Hall of Fame coach led FBI to ringleader

Friends, ex-players shocked by former-Yale women's soccer head

By David W. Chen and Marc Tracy, New York Times

Published
9:28 pm EDT, Friday, March 15, 2019

In a September 2016 photo, Yale's women's Head Soccer Coach Rudy Meredith gives a high five to a player after making a great play in a scrimmage, in Frankfort, Ky. According to the federal indictments unsealed Tuesday, March 12, 2019, Meredith put a prospective student who didn?t play soccer on a school list of recruits, doctored her supporting portfolio to indicate she was a player, and later accepted $400,000 from the head of a college placement company. (Doug Engle/Star-Banner via AP) less

In a September 2016 photo, Yale's women's Head Soccer Coach Rudy Meredith gives a high five to a player after making a great play in a scrimmage, in Frankfort, Ky. According to the federal indictments unsealed ... more

Photo: Doug Engle

Photo: Doug Engle

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In a September 2016 photo, Yale's women's Head Soccer Coach Rudy Meredith gives a high five to a player after making a great play in a scrimmage, in Frankfort, Ky. According to the federal indictments unsealed Tuesday, March 12, 2019, Meredith put a prospective student who didn?t play soccer on a school list of recruits, doctored her supporting portfolio to indicate she was a player, and later accepted $400,000 from the head of a college placement company. (Doug Engle/Star-Banner via AP) less

In a September 2016 photo, Yale's women's Head Soccer Coach Rudy Meredith gives a high five to a player after making a great play in a scrimmage, in Frankfort, Ky. According to the federal indictments unsealed ... more

Photo: Doug Engle

Hall of Fame coach led FBI to ringleader

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As Rudy Meredith was inducted into the Connecticut Soccer Hall of Fame in January to honor his 24-year run as Yale women's soccer coach, he sprinkled his hallmark humor and humility throughout his remarks.

He recounted how his wife was on the opposite sideline for the University of Hartford when they met in the early 2000s. And he saluted several people in the audience while repeatedly expressing "thankfulness," recalled Bill Duffy, a middle school principal and soccer lifer who served as master of ceremonies.

There was nothing in Meredith's words, Duffy said, "that would refer to anything that was going on."

Despite Meredith's placid demeanor, people who knew him best had recently begun to detect changes in his behavior. He seemed to be more anxious. He appeared less enthusiastic about soccer, even before he resigned as Yale's coach in November. He paid little attention to recruiting. He played poorly in pickleball, a paddle sport he usually excelled at.

In hindsight, those hints of stress and fatigue coincided with revelations that Meredith, 51, had been the linchpin of a sprawling federal investigation into corrupt college admissions schemes that exploded into public view this week.

At the heart of the scandal was a consultant, William Singer, who took $25 million to help fix exam scores or fraudulently misclassify prospective students as recruited athletes to boost their chances of being admitted to elite colleges. But the person who led federal authorities to Singer, according to court papers filed Tuesday, was Meredith.

In a Boston hotel on April 12, 2018, Meredith solicited a $450,000 bribe from the parent of a prospective college student in exchange for saving a Yale soccer recruitment spot for his daughter. Meredith took $2,000 from the parent, and directed the parent to wire future payments to a bank account in Connecticut. But the FBI was secretly recording the conversation, the charging documents said. Then six days later, the parent, who was working with the authorities, wired $4,000 to Meredith from a bank account in Boston that the FBI controlled, giving the government evidence of wire fraud.

With the authorities on to Meredith, he told them about a deal he had struck in November 2017, when Singer had introduced him to a man who wanted his daughter to attend Yale. Singer helped doctor the application to make it seem as though she was the co-captain of a prominent club soccer team in Southern California, even though she did not play at that level, according to the government documents. But Meredith told the admissions office he wanted to recruit her, and after she was admitted, Singer paid the coach $400,000.

Late Friday, Yale released a statement in which it said one student involved in the scheme was admitted and is attending now, while the other was denied admission. In the statement, Peter Salovey, the university president, called the criminal actions "an affront to our community's deeply held values of fairness, inclusion and honesty." Salovey said the university was starting an internal investigation into its admissions process.

It was a dramatic fall for a man considered to be a Yale institution. Meredith started as an assistant coach in 1992, rose to head coach in 1995 and led the team to its first unshared Ivy League title in 2005.

The charges blindsided virtually everyone who knew Meredith, according to interviews with more than a dozen former players and others connected to Yale or soccer. Meredith was generous and well-liked, and did not appear to have any health, financial or personal problems.

"I'm both appalled and sympathetic — I would never have thought that he was capable of doing this," said Sharon Eisen, a veterinarian who became friendly with the Merediths in recent years through pickleball, in which Meredith is a national-level player and coach. "On the one hand, I know them and like them personally. But on the other hand, I've lost all respect. So greedy. So immoral."

Meredith's wife, Eva Bergsten Meredith, was also a familiar presence at Yale soccer events. A former national team player for Sweden, she is the longtime women's soccer coach at Wesleyan, and has also run, with her husband, Bulldog Cardinal summer camp, for many years.

In 2013, in what former players said was an unusual move, the Yale women's coaching position itself was endowed in Rudy Meredith's name, thanks to an anonymous donation: For a time, Rudy Meredith was the Rudolph L. Meredith Head Coach of Women's Soccer. Even after Meredith's resignation in November, the name stuck: When Brendan Flaherty was hired as Meredith's replacement the next month, it was as the Loring Family and Rudolph L. Meredith Head Coach of Women's Soccer.

Now, Flaherty is listed on Yale's website as simply the Loring Family coach. It was not immediately clear when or why Yale made the change. A university spokesman said Meredith was not involved in funding and naming the position.

In recent years, Yale's teams did not perform as well as they had in the 2000s, and players and friends began to suspect that Meredith was no longer as gung-ho about soccer.

In August 2017, the Merediths purchased a vacation home in Fernandina Beach, Florida, for $125,000, and took out a construction loan for $359,250, records show. The next month, Rudy Meredith was badly shaken, friends say, by the unexpected death of Fritz Rodriguez, a longtime assistant coach who had been Meredith's roommate and teammate in college. So his resignation in November 2018 did not come as a complete surprise to some.

What few knew, of course, was that he had been cooperating with federal authorities for roughly half a year.

"In the soccer community, we're saddened by Rudy's personal involvement, whatever that may be," Duffy said. "I think more people are angry that more deserving players were overlooked."